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This time last year we knew we had sold the house. Which, for me, meant that the garden couldn’t come with us. Digging up plants when you change houses is technically illegal. This means you can’t remove the prize 'Joseph Rock' tree peony from a border, leaving a hole at the heart of the planting.

What you can do is choose the move as an opportunity to divide plants that can safely be lifted and halved. Most plants are better rejuvenated from time to time. But time is the key word. A winter move suits snowdrops and hellebores - although not everyone agrees about the timing for dividing snowdrops. June is when experts suggest, but June is too busy for most gardeners to be searching for bulbs that have died down. So for me, after flowering has always been the time.

Mary Keen and her old potting shedCredit:
Christopher Jones

Among the favourites, ‘Galatea’, ‘S. Arnott’, ‘Anglesey Abbey’, ‘Mrs McNamara’, ‘Diggory’, ‘Spindlestone Surprise’, ‘Peg Sharples’ and, of course, ‘Daglingworth’ all went into pots last year. Pots are not the best place for snowdrops, but for a short time, in free-draining compost, they should survive. A hard frost would not touch bulbs in the ground, but might finish off potted snowdrops.

Our snowdrop pots had to spend last summer in a shady place and a few are now flowering in their pots, waiting to go into the small orchard, which was the last area to be finished here. Most of them are fine, but there is a label marking the non-appearance of ‘Diggory’. The pre-Christmas Galanthus hiemalis produced leaves, but no flowers.

The only hellebores I like are the ones with rounded petals, like the old Ballard strains. These are harder to find now than outsize or frilly double flowers, so I wanted to keep some of these simpler favourites for the new place. Hellebores seed freely and I used to plant seedlings in the nursery bed at the old garden, to wait for them to flower, to see if they were worth keeping. This meant we had a few good plants to lift.

Division can be done in late winter or autumn, but hellebores dislike very wet or very dry conditions, which makes keeping them happy in pots a tense affair – especially if you are not around to monitor their needs. We spent three weeks unable to move in during the late July heatwave last summer, when I worried about the watering.

There are some signs of hellebore life in the new flower beds, but not all of the plants seem to have survived the move. Slugs can eat the buds and so can mice. And hellebores can take as long as two years to recover from being divided.

I spend quite a lot of time staring at the ground next to large labels for emerging shoots. One or two will flower. I worry about the rest. Large clumps of other herbaceous plants can be divided to take to a new garden, provided you leave enough for the next owners and make sure the leftovers are established before completion.

Looking for spring shoots can be an anxious affairCredit:
Diyana Dimitrova / iStockphoto

Most plants are all the better for being renewed by division, roughly every three years. Some, the summer-flowering ones like Michaelmas daisies, or asters (now Symphyotrichum – beastly name), are best divided in spring, once the soil has dried out a bit. Those that flower in early summer, like peonies, are better chopped up in the autumn. But irises like to be propagated in August, after they have flowered.

All the treasures that moved were properly labelled, with big black labels marked with silver pens. This is the only way to monitor progress. New gardens are anxiety-making places at this time of year. Peering for life is a twice-daily activity and it is all I can do to stop myself scratching around where a plant is supposed to be. Not long to wait now…